Despite mission of ending poverty, new report shows destructive legacy of World Bank projects across the planet

Joseph Kilimo Chebet, a father of five, standing next to the burned remains of his homestead in Kenya, destroyed only hours prior by Kenya Forest Service officers. (Photo: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)

The World Bank regularly broke its own promises to protect Indigenous rights around the globe by funding projects that displaced or threatened the livelihood of millions of the most vulnerable people on the planet, a new investigation has found.

Evicted and Abandoned, a joint report published Thursday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and several other outlets, found that a slew of World Bank-funded projects—including dams and power plants—have pushed 3.4 million people out of their homes or off their lands around the world since 2004.

ICIJ reviewed more than 6,000 World Bank documents and interviewed former and current employees and government officials who were involved in Bank-funded projects and found that in many cases, the World Bank violated its own internal policies and ignored evictions caused by its projects. The organization also did little to ensure the safety or livelihood of those who were resettled, in many cases not providing them with new housing or job prospects, as required.

“There was often no intent on the part of the governments to comply—and there was often no intent on the part of the bank’s management to enforce,” said Navin Rai, a former World Bank official who was responsible for the organization’s protection of Indigenous people from 2000 to 2012. “That was how the game was played.”

Between 2009 and 2013, World Bank Group lenders invested $50 billion in projects—like oil pipelines, mines, and dams—that were most likely to have “irreversible or unprecedented” social or climate impacts, such as physical or economic displacements, which have been shown to “rip apart kinship networks and increase risks of illness and disease,” according to the report.

“Resettled populations are more likely to suffer unemployment and hunger, and mortality rates are higher,” the report states.

Moreover, the World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., sometimes bankrolled regimes and companies that were accused of human rights violations including rape, murder, and torture, the report found. In some cases, the lenders continued to finance the operations even after evidence of such abuses emerged.

In Ethiopia, one initiative which was focused on health and education led to land grabs which involved violent mass evictions. Authorities there diverted millions of dollars from a World Bank project to fund those forced resettlements, and in 2011, soldiers who were responsible for carrying out the evictions killed at least seven people and targeted villagers for beatings and rape, according to the report.

The World Bank Inspection Panel found that the organization had failed to acknolwedge an “operational link” between its Ethiopian initiative and the mass eviction campaign—an oversight that violated the World Bank’s own rules.

In Nigeria, a Bank-funded project to improve water supplies, roads, and power in Lagos resulted in the eviction of nearly 2,000 slum-dwellers in Badia East, the report found. After Badia East residents sounded the alarm to the inspection panel, chairwoman Eimi Watanabe refused to open an investigation, instead urging them to negotiate with the Lagos state government, which gave out small sums of money as compensation. The panel then reportedly closed the case because of “the progress made and speedy provision of compensation to displaced people.”

Through its projects in those countries, as well as in Albania, Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Peru, Serbia, South Sudan, and Uganda, the World Bank “[failed] to protect people moved aside in the name of progress,” the report found.

“In these countries and others, the investigation found, the bank’s lapses have hurt urban slum dwellers, hardscrabble farmers, impoverished fisherfolk, forest dwellers and indigenous groups—leaving them to fight for their homes, their land and their ways of life, sometimes in the face of intimidation and violence,” the report reads.

ICIJ’s report comes as the World Bank is increasing its call for projects that require forced resettlements. On Friday, the bank will begin its yearly Spring Meetings with the International Monetary Fund, where new policies will be considered. Some of the organization’s officials have expressed doubt over what the bank has called its “strongest, most state-of-the-art environmental and social safeguards,” but which critics say give foreign governments room to avoid complying with the bank’s standards.

Ahead of the meetings, a coalition of more than 260 global NGOs, farmer groups, and trade unions is publicly posing three questions to the bank about its role in the land grabs, as well as “climate destruction and the corporatization of agriculture.”

Those questions include:

Why have you not spoken to farmers before promoting massive agriculture-reform programs?

Why are you rewarding countries that cede their power and wealth to foreign corporations, while punishing those who spend on the health and wellbeing of their populations?

Why are you prioritizing farming models that destroy the environment and impoverish people, over those that work in harmony with the environment and are already feeding the world?

In a joint letter to the World Bank published Wednesday, 85 NGOs urged the organization to address the “numerous and serious failings of the safeguards system” and solve its “deep-seated fundamental flaws… by identifying the people who have been displaced by bank-financed projects and providing them with genuine sustainable development opportunities through a series of new grant-funded projects.”

Among the signatories are Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, and the Africa Law Foundation, as well as Raquel Rolnik, former United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing.

The report’s findings are “deeply troubling,” the letter reads. “While it is important that the review of Bank-financed projects was undertaken and finally published, the lack of transparency demonstrated by the Bank in concealing the Review’s findings—for three years in the case of part one and nine months in the case of part two—is unacceptable for a public institution.”

ICIJ and Huffington Post will feature stories, photographs, and videos of these resettlements on a microsite hosted by the Huffington Post, beginning Thursday, April 16.

Global temperatures will rise nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels by the middle of the century regardless of actions taken to curb emissions, according to a report from the World Bank released Sunday. The rising temperatures are already disproportionately affecting developing countries and the world’s poorest citizens.

Current energy demands mean the world is committed to emitting more greenhouse gases, which will stay in the atmosphere for decades. That means that even with “very ambitious mitigation action,” the report states, temperatures will continue to rise past the 0.8 degrees Celsius increase already seen today.

“That’s a big message,” Samantha Smith, head of climate for the WWF, told VICE News. “Globally, what all countries have agreed to is that they’re going to keep warming under two degrees Celsius. This report is telling us that 1.5 degrees is too much for a lot of people.”

In the three areas examined in the new report — Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Western Balkans and Central Asia — climate change will lead to reduced crop yields and worsened drought, bringing threats to water supplies.In Brazil, soybean crop yields could decrease by as much as 70 percent, and wheat by as much as 50 percent, if temperatures increase two degrees by 2050. Jordan, Egypt, and Libya could see crop yields decrease by 30 percent.

In Russia, melting permafrost and tree death in boreal forests are releasing stored methane and carbon, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. A similar pattern is being seen in the Amazon rainforest, which absorbs 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, according to the environmental organization Amazon Watch. A two degree increase could wipe out 90 percent of coral reefs, devastating coastal ecosystems and the economies and fisheries that depend on them.

“When we talk to policy makers, they seem to be able to pivot and think extreme weather events are not affecting us right now,” Sasanka Thilakasiri, policy advisor for Oxfam International, told VICE News. “To me, the report is important in just sort of saying these impacts are happening now, and we’re on a path to having them even more exacerbated if we don’t do anything.”

The report, which was authored by researchers at The Potsdam Institute, a German climate research center, linked recent extreme heat in the observed regions to climate change with 80 percent certainty.

The report comes at a busy moment for climate change negotiations — just one week before a United Nations climate conference in Peru and two weeks after the United States and China, the two largest emitters, announced a joint agreement on emissions reductions. President Obama committed the United States to cutting emissions 26-28 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels, while China’s president Xi Jinping said his country’s emissions would peak “around 2030.”

‘This is a problem for both rich and poor.’

Last week, 30 nations pledged $9.3 billion over the next four years to the Green Climate Fund, designed to help developing nations reduce emissions and adapt to the consequences of climate change caused largely by the actions of richer nations. The United States pledged $3 billion. At the fund’s inception, it was envisioned to provide $100 billion a year by 2020.

“This is a problem for both rich and poor,” Thilakasiri told VICE News. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that we can provide the financing that’s needed to move the global economy away from our carbon habit.”

The World Bank hasn’t invested any funds in coal use in the last five years but it did not make a commitment to divesting entirely from fossil fuel exploration and technology development.

“We cannot ask these energy-poor countries to wait until there are ways of, for example, ensuring that solar and wind power can provide the kind of base load that all countries need in order to industrialize,” Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said. “We believe very strongly that the poorest countries have a right to energy. And all of the fossil fuel burning, for example, in Africa, would not contribute any significant amount to the overall carbon that’s in the air.”

While the World Bank’s overall investments in fossil fuels have decreased since 2008, the organization spent $1 billion financing fossil fuel exploration in 2013, according to Oil Change International

“That, from our perspective, is a problem, because it is exactly these kinds of projects that are burning the stuff that’s causing climate change,” WWF’s Smith told VICE News. “When it comes to developed countries shouldering their weight, we’re seeing some political signals, but they’re very far from being strong enough or fast enough or at the scale that we need to really do something.”

Bolivia’s president talks about the country’s ongoing socio-economic transformation and his third term in office.

– by Al Jazeera

In 2009, under the country’s first indigenous president a new constitution declared Bolivia a plurinational state – ending centuries of undeclared apartheid.

Opponents in the oil-rich eastern region launched a civil disobedience movement, confronting the east against the poorer, indigenous majority who support President Evo Morales. Critics denounced the president’s fiery socialist rhetoric and the nationalisation of Bolivia’s oil and gas industry in the poorest and most undeveloped nation in South America.

Five years later, from the World Bank to the IMF, Evo Morales is getting full marks for overseeing an unprecedented transformation of Bolivia. Spurred by high commodity prices, economic growth is now the highest in the region.

And while the president’s anti-capitalist discourse is as strong as ever, a mix of mainstream economics and social programmes has dramatically reduced poverty and unemployment, while allowing the private sector to flourish.

“We have taken flight towards development. What others could not do in 180 years we have done in some nine years of profound changes …. We are going to make Bolivia the energy hub for South America,” says Morales.

In a region where personality cults are too common, millions of Bolivians have come to worship Morales.

He has just been re-elected after a disputed court decision allowing him to run for a third consecutive term as president.

“I believe that some revolutions, some transformations, are driven by a person. I don’t like it, but I am happy that there is now an Evo generation, a new generation of young men and women with a great deal of knowledge, principles, and values, who are assuming leadership. I am very pleased with the way young people are getting involved. Obviously, much depends on the process, on the steps we take to ensure good economic stability with social benefits,” Morales says.

Morales not only opposes the eradication and abolition of the coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine. He is also waging an international campaign to legalise and industrialise its use for traditional and medicinal purposes. He made headlines when he demonstrated how the plant is chewed at the United Nations, the same body that declared the plant an illegal narcotic in 1961.

He says: “It [drug trafficking] must be fought – we are convinced of that – and we are doing so more effectively and more wisely. When the United States was in control of counternarcotics, the US governments used drug trafficking for purely geopolitical purposes …. The US uses drug trafficking and terrorism for political control …. We have nationalised the fight against drug trafficking. ”

“The best way to fight drug trafficking is to engage the people. Then there will not be zero coca, but neither can there be unfettered coca cultivation, because a problem does exist. As long as there is market demand for cocaine, the sacred, natural leaf, the medicinal coca leaf will always be associated with this illegal problem. The root cause of drug trafficking is demand, because the developed countries are not stopping the demand for cocaine.”

On Talk to Al Jazeera, President Evo Morales gives an insight into his personal life and discusses his controversial decision to legalise child labour, his expulsion of the US ambassador, the issue of drug trafficking – and whether he plans to step down when this term is over.